Russia Ww1 Quotes

We modern civilizations have learned to recognize that we are mortal like the others. We had heard tell of whole worlds vanished, of empires foundered with all their men and all their engines, sunk to the inexplorable depths of the centuries with their gods and laws, their academies and their pure and applied sciences, their grammars, dictionaries, classics, romantics, symbolists, their critics and the critics of their critics. We knew that all the apparent earth is made of ashes, and that ashes have a meaning. We perceived, through the misty bulk of history, the phantoms of huge vessels once laden with riches and learning. We could not count them. But these wrecks, after all, were no concern of ours. Elam, Nineveh, Babylon were vague and splendid names; the total ruin of these worlds, for us, meant as little as did their existence. But France, England, Russia, these names, too, are splendid. And now we see that the abyss of history is deep enough to bury all the world. We feel that a civilization is fragile as a life.

The great strength of Bukharin’s analysis lies in his refusal to accept that state control can be identified with “socialism” in any form. In the First World War the fact that the whole of social and economic life was subject to the domination of the militarised state meant that amongst the capitalists there were many who claimed that this was “state socialism”. Ironically Bukharin did not see that the same thing had happened in Soviet Russia as a result of the civil war.